Apple sells supercomputer to US Gov't

U.S. Army contractor COLSA announced today that it has purchased 1,566 dual processor Xserve G5s from Apple for $5.8 million. The Xserves will be assembled into a computer that is expected to reach 15 teraflops when it goes online this fall.

While COLSA will reportedly use Mac OS X as the primary operating system, it plans to evaluate other options including Red Hat Linux and Yellow Dog Linux.

The COLSA system follows Virginia Tech's System X cluster, which is currently being upgraded to 1,110 Xserve G5 computers. System X is expected to be back online in time to produce a score for the next Top500 list of supercomputers in November.